Why not just listen to my Insurance Company?

Posted on Thursday, July 5th, 2018 at 4:55 pm

Oftentimes people will not contact an attorney early-on because the insurance company is paying their benefits, paying their medical, the insurance adjusters are the nicest persons in the world to them and they think everything is going along just fine and all of a sudden they send them something called an IME (independent medical examination) we like to refer to them as defense medical examination and what will happen is, in our workers compensation case, the insurance company when they think you’ve had enough treatment or they think that you should be fully recovered and they don’t agree with the opinion of your treating doctor a lot of times your treating doctor told you to go and see, they then send you for this defense medical examination or IME. What that is is they hire a doctor simply to perform a one-time examination most of the times the doctor will tell you upfront “I’m not here to treat you, I’m not here to give you any recommendations, I’m simply here to examine you and provide the insurance company a report regarding your injuries and whether or not you can go back to work”.

Nine times out of ten those doctors will give a report to the insurance companies who have hired them time and time again that you are either fully recovered or you can go back to work or say something contradicting to what your treating doctor has to say and then use that as a basis to either file a termination petition to try and cutoff completely your right to either wage loss and or medical benefit and they will file either a suspension or modification petition based on additional evidence that says that “you can earn more money based on your physical capabilities and the jobs that we’ve offered to you or the jobs that are available in the marketplace.”